Has the beating heart of English been stilled in America? A language of great power and expressiveness grows from the shared vocabulary of a reading public. The writer draws on the vocabulary to create the extraordinary from the everyday. Therefore, what a person reads, speaks, and hears spoken produces the materials, the raw language, which the writer mines and anneals to create literary works. Language, of course, is not static. Language reflects the society around us. For instance, our remoteness from agriculture has eliminated almost all the words for domesticated birds from our vocabulary and left us with the generic term “chicken”. Simultaneously, the number of words we have for cars has expanded greatly. We deal significantly more with cars than with chickens.
Were it simply a matter of slowly exchanging vocabulary, there would be little trouble for English. Other forces, however, have been at work. Over the last century our society has grown increasingly homogenous – so has our language. Several culprits can be identified for this growth in homogeneity. Mass media, magazines, radio, and TV, have tended to standardize spoken and written English. Regional variation has been necessarily reduced to allow communication with the largest possible audience. Similarly, because a mass audience is the goal of mass media, the media strives to simplify language so that low levels of language competence will not preclude one from becoming a member of the audience. Relentless pressure has come from media over the last century to both simplify and homogenize English.
The way we live has also contributed dramatically to the decline in linguistic richness. Roughly 120 million Americans commute to work by car every day. That means over a third of the population gets into a car and drives to work. When you deduct school age children and retirees it turns out nearly the entire working population of the country does very nearly the same thing every morning. The stock image of Soviet factory workers trudging in long lines to smoke darkened factories has long been used to highlight American freedom. Yet, en masse, like the factory workers, we all repeat the same act. We also eat at the same restaurants, consume the same beverages and so forth. The result is that the diversity of our language is slowly reduced because the variety of our lives is reduced.
Consider our experience of the weather. If one gets up in the morning in a centrally heated or cooled house, then drives to work to an air-conditioned building and then drives home again, it is not only possible but probable and quite ordinary to have almost no interaction with the weather. One knows that it is cold or hot, rainy or sunny, but because we are so systematically insulated from changes in weather, we need not pay particular attention to it. When our attention and experience decline, our vocabulary and appreciation decline as well. An author, then, who might wish to write about weather faces a reading audience with little experience and even less vocabulary with which to comprehend it.
As our world has grown more homogenous it has also grown more specialized. While we wake in houses of roughly the same temperature and drive similar cars to similar buildings, once we are in those buildings what we do has become increasingly incomprehensible to non-specialists. The example here is acronyms. Because specialists share experience, they develop acronyms to more efficiently communicate common ideas. However, to non-specialist, acronyms mean nothing. What after all is an S.I.V., or E.S.L., or S.F.I.? If you were an investor, English teacher, or forester you would know one these terms. However, it is quite likely that you would also be ignorant of the other two. Excessive specialization presents as great a problem as homogenization of the language. It is the shared language that the writer draws upon for expression. Specialization introduces into usage vast vocabularies that are not expressive of any shared experience or idea. So while our shared experiences have become insipid, our specialization has rendered us mute.
A final, and perhaps decisive, force working against an expressive English has been advertising and political speech – often indistinguishable. To communicate requires a shared understanding of what words mean and how they are to be used. Unfortunately, our society is permeated by ad-speak and political-speak that systematically twists language to mislead and to prevent communication. Advertisers are fond of saying things like “Made with real fruit juice.” On first reading or hearing this phrase, one might think soundly enough the product contains mostly or even only fruit juice. Of course, we have generally learned not to trust ad-speak and have discovered that “Made with” means there is a drop of fruit juice for every thousand gallons of artificial sweeteners, flavors, and other effluvia. Politicians strive for even greater levels of deception by appearing to say something which, in fact, means nothing. Consumers have, or should have, become suspicious of language. President Bush on a recent visit to Israel said, "I come with high hopes. And the role of the United States will be to foster a vision of peace. The role of the Israeli leadership and the Palestinian leadership is going to do the hard work necessary to define a vision.” While high hopes, fostering, peace, and vision all sound good, this paragraph means nothing. Hopes for what? Not peace, but a vision of peace that has yet to be defined – which of course is not a vision but a plan for the Israeli and Palestinian leadership to have a vision in the very near future. Not peace, mind you, but a vision of peace. As ridiculous as this passage seems, we are immersed in these kinds of pronouncements almost continually. Most current presidential candidates are for “Change,” for instance. Change what? Are they for climate change, sex change, spare change? Endlessly repeated, perpetually meaningless phrases abound in our culture.
The reader cannot help but become both wary and cynical about language. Sentences likely don’t mean what they say and may not mean anything at all. How can a writer create vivid expression for a reading audience habituated to distrust language. It is as if museum goers had all become convinced the colors and textures of paintings were misleading and, hence, did not trust what they saw when looking at paintings. The writer, and fiction writer in particular, has little chance in such an environment.
Our culture has many elements that work against deep engagement with serious literature. Our lives are full of distractions, our attention span and quiet time has been greatly reduced, and the value we place on literature has diminished over the last century. However, the much greater threat is to the language itself. As the richness and variety of our lives has been reduced to a weak gruel of conformity, the language loses expressive variety. Our work, which plays a central role in many lives, is becoming a hermetic experience, real to the individual but not-communicable outside of the speciality. Finally, from advertising and politicians we have learned to be leery of language. It is not so much that the importance and power of literature is declining. The history of humane letters makes it clear that the cultural significance of the arts of all kinds wax and wane, often unpredictably. No, it is rather that serious literary work may become impossible in American English. We may soon, or have already, reached a point where the reading public has so little vocabulary, so threadbare an existence, and such an abiding mistrust of language itself, that serious literary works become impossible.